Coca-Cola: No Short-Term Sales Boost From Online Chatter

A Coca-Cola study has found that online buzz or chatter yields no measurable short-term sales benefit, while online display ads work about as well as TV, according to a C-C executive who spoke at
the Advertising Research Foundation's Re:Think 2013 conference, reports Advertising Age.

As AA notes, this would seem a stunning
admission from Coca-Cola, whose flagship brand has more Facebook fans than any other brand (61.5 million).

However, senior manager-marketing strategy and insights Eric Schmidt stressed
that the finding relates only to "buzz," not sharing, video views or other aspects of social media.

Schmidt also stressed that this was a single study on a set of brands within a
particular company within a certain segment of the CPG industry, and is "by no means a generalized result that applies to all industries," Ad Age reports.

He also said that Coca-Cola
is now looking to refine how it measures buzz -- for instance, its real reach, not just raw, publicly-available comments on social media platforms, as well as better refining positive versus negative
buzz, which C-C found to be lacking in automated/vendor-assessed analyses by one vendor.

But C-C found digital display ads to be as effective as TV in generating sales, on a per-impression
basis, Schmidt said. Search was 50% as effective as TV – about the same as out-of-home – with radio coming in between TV and search and print scoring slightly more effective than TV, he
reported, according to Ad Age.